David Young

Biography

David Young is an artist who has spent his entire career at the leading edge of emerging technologies, working across generative adversarial networks, artificial intelligence, and, more recently, quantum computing. During the early GAN era, Young trained his own models on personal photographs of nature, including flowers, trees, and the landscapes of upstate New York, deliberately using small, handcrafted datasets to push the models toward their limits. The resulting images, seen in series like Learning Nature and Dandelion, are genuinely strange and genuinely beautiful, treating the imperfections and failures of an undertrained model as a source of aesthetic discovery rather than a flaw to correct. This body of early work is now considered among the more historically important GAN-based practices from that period, predating the accessible APIs and consumer interfaces that would later define mainstream AI art. Young has since moved his practice into quantum art, using quantum computing systems to continue his investigation into how beauty and aesthetic experience can offer new intuitions for understanding emerging and often inscrutable technologies. Series such as Q, Flag, and Q-Stable extend this inquiry, treating the artwork as a meditation on "the new" and its inevitable, eventual obsolescence. Across both his GAN and quantum-based work, Young positions himself as a champion for new forms of creativity enabled by technology.